Could you please explain how the satellite observing the arctic sea ice affects climate change? As far as I can tell, until this past year (the paris climate ag

Could you please explain how the satellite observing the arctic sea ice affects climate change? As far as I can tell, until this past year (the paris climate agreement) that hasn't been a significant effort to reduce carbon emissions on a global scale, which almost certainly wouldn't have an appreciable affect on the extent/surface area of arctic sea ice (carbon cycles through the atmosphere very slowly (the fastest processes take about a year and the slowest take millions of years[0]) so it will take a while before the affects of human intervention actually propagate to the scale of global climate). Also, you can certainly study outliers with statistics. In fact, most scientific discoveries (these days) all start out as outliers or statistical anomalies. The Higgs boson, Top quark, J/Psi,... every single particle described by the Standard Model (the most accurate scientific theory by far) all started out as anomalies and outliers. The fact that this years sea ice measurements are outliers doesn't mean they are necessarily a large statistical fluctuation, it could be that there is a new climate phenomenon taking place (look up the runaway greenhouse effect). I'm not saying that is what is happening here but we have no idea a priori which is the truth at the moment: it's a statistical fluctuation or it's a sign of a new climate phenomenon. Clearly all we can do is continue to study it using, among other tools, statistics. [0] - http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/page2.php http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/page2....